A few of these items might sound familiar and recent relative to this set.

1.1. Snow

Originally seen in big numbers in Coldsnap and later infamously expanded in Modern Horizons 1 (albeit not as dominant of a theme as the threequel can have things), this is Magic’s way of representing the snow: just a toggle you turn on for the land so you get a special modifier on your mana to get some bonuses. Granted, in the draft where you need to pick the snow land, this is ultra interesting. In constructed, it’s just a pain on your wallet and vastly restricts what art you can use on your basics. Safe to say, you can tell this is a very 1995 Magic decision that 10 years later they misread into the nonsense we got today.

This time, our twist on Snow is that all the snow cards got this whiteout frame on them. This feels like training your eyes for Double Feature the bad frame pack, I’ll say that much. And no, we aren’t errataing all the ancient cards mentioning snow to get this type (like Skred), so tough luck Nephilims, because technically if you could turn these things into mana dorks, there is a difference in function.

There’s one white god that will counter snow in this set. Just enough to not repeat the terror those two sets caused. With that being said, let’s look at the cards selection.

• Rare: There’s a cycle of snow sorceries (blue is an instant instead) that have a bonus effect scaled with the amount of snow mana spent to cast the spell. It can be something as worthless as 1 life to a max of 3, or as valuable to be able to reanimate a creature. Other cards include: A mono blue evolving creatures because the designers really like these three repeating paragraphs, a kraken that is cheaper the more ice is there to break, the snow god in Sultai because total of two faces, and the most famous one: Faceless Haven.
• Uncommon: We learn Dimir and Simic are the archetypes here, and also Gruul want to join in because snow stone is certainly better to create than a normal stone, Green has the most practical card, Blue has entirely activated abilities and black has the hardest hitting artwork here.
• Common: The one red card we have here has proven to be enough so that entire decks move to snow land, as I just said. We also get the very first Evolving Static here (the thriving lands are stronger than these), because you certainly can’t just have the fetch land magically turns your basic into snow, right? Or restrict the find to just snow lands.

Actually, there’s one card calling for snow cards without having the type itself. It’s a Saga, so I guess you don’t want to waste time designing a frame for this one card.

1.1.1. Draft lands cycle

I’ll reserve the basic lands to their typical section, despite the fact that they’re actually useful to a draft deck now. Here we just talk to the cards you’ll need to focus on just as much during the draft: the snow dual lands.

At this point in time, draft dual lands were still a relatively novel thing to appear consistently. Before that, they’re more than willing to print tapped duals with zero upside at uncommon, and just half of the pairs, if anything. Like Coldsnap, which at least does give them an upside in being snow. Then that cycle got untouched, even today. The only other upside to my knowledge is 1 life in Zendikar’s allied Refuges (name structure wise, basically still untouched) and Tarkir’s full cycle, which Magic eventually adopts as the default draft dual land of choice. From this context, it must be mind blowing to see a new upside.

From the last set, we learned that not having basic land types can be quite a nerf to a land. So, how about doing the opposite to these otherwise terrible cards? On top of the snow supertype to make these lands valuable in a draft. And that’s how we come here. The normal versions be damned, that will take 1.5 more years. In the meantime, if you do want to use a sharpie on these cards to get proxies of the original dual lands, that’s one more you have to cross and the text box is a lot whiter.

Name wise, a cycle of snow lands will surely not have the most generic of names. How many new words would need to be used? Let’s pull out a vocabulary lesson.

What should you know?

• Use regular expressions with words like: Ice and Mire.
• Should Floodplain count? Considering I’m going off an ancient card that literally is Flood Plain?
• Words actually relating to snow are as follows: Glacial, Ice, Arctic, Snowfield. There’s a surprising amount of cards before this set that used these words, despite not being snow at all.
• We do get one obvious word in Forest.